Preaching and Paganism | Page 3

a
respectable civilization. They are positive and impressive figures
pursuing and acting up to their own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from
self-accepted retribution or falling away from a confessed morality of

ours. Evil is a force even more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily
building away at the City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent
and scoffing society within the very precincts of the City of God.
He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements
of man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform, the
last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted grief and
smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions are a
grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of our universe;
suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he must preach upon
the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to the house of
shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is something past
finding out in evil, something incommunicable about true sorrow. They
are not external things, alien to our natures, that happen one day from
without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and by are gone. No; that
which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is their naturalness; they
well up from within, part of the very texture of our consciousness. He
knows you can never express them, for truly to do that you would have
to express and explain the entire world. It is not easy then to interpret
the evil and suffering which are not external and temporary, but
enduring and a part of the whole.
So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncomplicated matters. It
is his business to perceive the mystery of iniquity in the saint and to
recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner. It is his business to
revere the child and yet watch him that he may make a man of him. He
must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk at discipline, and
rail at self-repression, and resent pain: you have not yet begun to live
nor made the first step toward understanding the universe and
yourselves. To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is to evade life.
There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and the suffering of the
world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment. When you are honest
with yourself you will know what Dante meant when he said:
"And thou shalt see those who Contented are within the fire; Because
they hope to come, When e'er it may be, to the blessed people."[1]
It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, and yet speak to

them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitterness and assuage
the sorrows of old age. I suppose the greatest influence a preacher ever
exercises, and a chief source of the material and insight of his
preaching, is found in this intimate contact with living and suffering,
divided and distracted men and women. When strong men blench with
pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at the sight and we can endure
naught else but to suffer with them, when youth is blurred with sin, and
gray heads are sick with shame and we, then, want to die and cry, O
God! forgive and save them or else blot me out of Thy book of life--for
who could bear to live in a world where such things are the end!--then,
through the society of sorrow, and the holy comradeship in shame, we
begin to find the Lord and to understand both the kindness and the
justice of His world. In the moment when sympathy takes the bitterness
out of another's sorrow and my suffering breaks the captivity of my
neighbor's sin--then, when because "together," with sinner and sufferer,
we come out into the quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive
how the very heart of God, upon which there we know we rest, may be
found in the vicarious suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow
and the evil of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then
we dimly understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of
Christ!
[Footnote 1: The Divine Comedy: Hell; canto I.]
Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped with
professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can
minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of
a human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish, is
like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy
tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated
mechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the